Dreams of Fear

Twenty-Nine

Vogel arrested and cautioned Jimmy Granger and asked for him to be delivered to Barnstaple police station.

A shaken looking Sam Ferguson was by then standing in front of the chapel watching the arrest. Saslow was with him, one hand tucked supportively beneath his right elbow.

Sam seemed to be favouring his right leg, and his right hand was bleeding.

Vogel walked across the yard to join them.

‘You all right, Mr Ferguson?’ he enquired, well aware that the older man clearly wasn’t. He was trembling, and his face was ashen.

‘Hurt my knee when I fell to the ground, and grazed my hand when I tried to save myself,’ Sam replied. ‘Other than that, I think I’m OK.’

‘Good,’ said Vogel.

He wanted some straight talking from Sam Ferguson at last, so he decided to strike whilst the other man was in obvious shock.

‘You do realize you were very nearly killed in there, don’t you?’ he asked.

Ferguson nodded.

‘Yes, and I think I would have been if it hadn’t been for you two,’ he said. ‘You saved my life.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Vogel. ‘You can do something for me now. You can start telling me what you know, as you clearly know much more than you have revealed so far, about the murder of your daughter-in-law, and a lot else besides, I reckon. I want the truth, all of it.’

Ferguson nodded again.

‘Yes, of course, absolutely everything, I promise you,’ he said, with what Vogel was sure was rare subservience. ‘Gerry told me I didn’t know what I was getting into. And he was certainly right about that. I came here to meet Gerry... ’ Ferguson paused, looking puzzled.

‘Where is Gerry? Did he tell you I was here?’

‘No, Mr Ferguson, he did not,’ said Vogel bluntly. ‘I am afraid Mr Barham is dead.’

‘G-Gerry, d-dead?’ Sam stumbled. ‘No. H-how? He wasn’t murdered too, w-was he?’

‘We think so, yes.’

‘And someone... someone came after me, too. A complete stranger, I think. I saw his face just then, when he was arrested. I have no idea who... ’

Ferguson broke off in mid-sentence. There was suddenly real fear in his eyes.

‘Mr Vogel, my family. Amelia. The twins. Oh, what have I done?’

His voice grew louder, and there was a note of near hysteria in it.

‘Are they in danger too?’

‘I think the danger might be over, certainly for the time being, now we’ve made this arrest,’ replied Vogel. ‘But in any case, I have arranged for a police presence at your home twenty-four seven. Your family are safe, Mr Ferguson.’

‘T-thank you, thank you.’

He’d lowered his voice to a more normal level, but, as he spoke, Sam Ferguson’s knees began to buckle. Saslow gripped his elbow more firmly. Vogel stepped forward to take his other arm.

‘An ambulance is on its way, we need to get you checked out in hospital,’ said the DCI. ‘But first, I really want to speak to you before we interview your assailant, and indeed before we talk to your son again. Do you think you might feel up to that? We can sit in our car.’

‘Yes, of course, anything I can do, anything,’ said Ferguson. ‘I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid.’

‘Thank you,’ said Vogel, who couldn’t wait to hear exactly what it was that Sam Ferguson had done which he now regretted so much.

Together with Saslow he helped Sam to the car. Vogel didn’t think the other man was badly hurt physically, although his knee looked sore, but he was clearly badly shaken. The DCI remained determined to take full advantage of that.

He sat in the front with Ferguson. Saslow installed herself in the back.

‘Right, Mr Ferguson, I want you to begin at the beginning,’ instructed Vogel. ‘It is becoming clear that you have been afraid of something, or at least that you probably had certain knowledge which was causing you concern, ever since the death of your daughter-in-law. Could you tell me about that, please?’

‘Well, we were always suspicious of Jane,’ replied Ferguson. ‘We didn’t like her, Amelia and I, neither of us liked her, I told you that before. But it was more than that. There was something about her. We were suspicious of her past, which seemed... so... so mysterious. Felix, well, Felix is loyal by nature, always has been, and he loved Jane so much... Look, he couldn’t have killed Jane, you’ve got to believe that, Mr Vogel. Perhaps you do believe that now?’

The man had switched to another train of thought. He was obviously desperate to save his son, and Vogel didn’t blame him. Vogel had, of course, never been entirely convinced of Felix’s guilt. But he wasn’t telling Sam Ferguson that yet.

‘Clearly we have new strands of enquiry, which I promise you we will investigate thoroughly,’ he said. ‘Now, please continue with what you were starting to tell me.’

Sam nodded.

‘Yes, well, as I was saying, Felix is loyal by nature, and he told us very little, and Jane nothing at all,’ he continued. ‘When it became apparent there were problems, he just said Jane kept having bad dreams and wasn’t sleeping well. He made fairly light of it, but we could tell he was worried, and he’s not a worrier. Not normally. Not Felix.

‘Then something happened. And I did something I now regret with all my heart. It was about six weeks ago. A weekend. We had the kids on Friday evening as usual. Felix told us he and Jane were going out, to the cinema and for a meal. Something they didn’t do very often. In spite of how we felt about Jane we were glad they were doing something normal together. For the sake of the children. About seven o’clock, I think it was, Felix called. He sounded quite stressed. He said Jane had convinced herself she’d left the iron on and the house was going to burn down. Now, she was a worrier. And she could be quite neurotic. We always thought that. She wanted to go home and check, call off their night out, which Felix had been looking forward to. He asked if I would drive over and check everything was all right and text him back, so he could put her mind at rest.

‘So, I did. The iron was still out on the ironing board, but it was switched off, of course. As Felix had always suspected. I was just about to text Felix when I thought I heard a noise upstairs. I went up to check, not really expecting to find anything, opened the door to the master bedroom, flicked the lights on, and saw at once that there was a chair in the middle of the room beneath the smoke alarm, which had been removed, and there were wires hanging down. I walked in, thinking at first that the room was empty, then I turned around and there was Gerry standing behind the door. Trying to hide himself, only not making a very good job of it. I don’t know which of us was the most shocked to see each other, to tell the truth.

‘He was holding two smoke alarms. I asked him what on earth was going on. He tried to prevaricate, but he clearly had no explanation at all.

‘Then, well, I half remembered something I’d read, in a newspaper or maybe online, about surveillance cameras concealed in what appear to be ordinary smoke alarms, so I grabbed the ones Gerry was holding. He barely tried to stop me. Well, I am about six inches taller than him and four stone heavier. Sure enough, one of them was a surveillance camera. I could hardly believe my eyes. Little Gerry Barham was installing a hidden surveillance camera in my son’s bedroom.’

Vogel blinked rapidly behind his spectacles. He didn’t know quite what he’d expected to hear from Sam Ferguson, but certainly not this.

‘So what did you do next?’ he asked.

‘Well, I told Gerry not to move, then I reached for my phone and started to dial 999,’ Ferguson continued. ‘Then I stopped. I thought I’d talk to him first. Find out what was going on. I’ll be honest, Mr Vogel, it occurred to me very quickly, and I’m really not proud of this, that I might be able to use this situation. And that I might learn the answers to some of the questions Amelia and I had been asking for years.’

‘Sam, one of your son’s neighbours was putting a secret camera in your son’s bedroom,’ interjected Vogel, who’d decided formality could be abandoned now that he had just saved the other man’s life. ‘Didn’t you think he might merely be a voyeur?’

‘What, little Gerry?’ queried Sam. ‘No way.’

‘So what was he doing then? Why was he spying on your family, in an extremely, uh, intimate manner?’

‘He told me that he was in... well, a rather special branch of the civil service, that’s all he said, and he was suddenly given a big bonus and an early retirement deal generous enough for him to relocate to Instow and live in some luxury for the rest of his life. In return he had to keep an eye on Jane. That’s all. He said he never knew why, and he didn’t ask. Jane and Felix seemed like an ordinary happily married young couple to him. He cultivated them, and reported back periodically to his employers, and everyone was happy. There never seemed to be any cause for concern. Then Gerry had a drink with Felix, a week or so before I found him in their house, and Felix got drunk and opened his heart a bit, confessed how worried he was about Jane’s bad dreams. How she woke up screaming, quite hysterically, and how it was beginning to affect their whole lives. He told Gerry far more than he’d ever told me. Said he felt it was caused by something in her past life that she claimed to have no memory of.

‘Well, Gerry reported back. He said that afterwards he wished he hadn’t. His controllers suddenly went into overdrive. They said they wanted to know all about these dreams. That it was vital. And they sent him that smoke alarm surveillance outfit. A very sophisticated little number that linked to his phone.’

‘Did you ask Gerry how he got in to your son’s house? I presume it was all locked up when you got there.’

‘Yes. He told me he had a set of keys. He’d sneaked off and got them cut one day when he and his wife were babysitting. Just in case, he said.’

‘What did you do next?’ Vogel asked.

‘Well, I wanted to know about Jane’s past more than ever. I told Gerry I wouldn’t call the police, in fact I wouldn’t tell anyone about our meeting, I would let him carry on with his surveillance unhindered, as long as he shared any relevant material with me. I told him I wanted to see what was going on in my son’s life.’

‘And Gerry agreed to this?’

‘Yes. I suppose he didn’t have much choice. I said that if he didn’t agree, I’d blow his nasty little operation, whatever it really was, out of the water.’

‘Did you see any footage?’

‘Yes. Mostly Gerry just called me and told me what he’d seen. But I insisted on seeing at least some of it. It was pretty disturbing stuff. Jane screaming her head off. Felix trying desperately to calm her down and keep her quiet. And then... well, there was the time he woke to find Jane shaking little Joanna. We didn’t actually see that because it happened in the children’s bedroom. But there was film of them in their bedroom afterwards, when, uh... ’

‘When what, Sam?’

‘Well, Felix was clearly very frustrated. Furious actually. And he isn’t an angry man by nature. He told Jane he would never trust her with his children again. And, uh, well, I am afraid he hit her. Across the face. And his ring caught her cheek, cut it open. There was a lot of blood. It wasn’t very pleasant to see.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’

‘No. So, when Jane died, and we learned a murder investigation had been launched, well, I knew right away I should tell you about Gerry and his mysterious surveillance, but I was afraid it would lead you to suspect Felix.’

‘Do you still have any of that footage?’

‘No. Gerry showed it me, but he wouldn’t send me a copy. Not of anything. I had to meet up with him and watch on his phone. It was... uh... all a bit sordid really, I’m afraid.’

‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it?’

Vogel knew he was blinking vigorously behind his spectacles again. And his attempts to control it were not succeeding very well.

‘You were intruding on your son and daughter-in-law’s privacy, spying on them, watching them and allowing someone else, a relative stranger, to watch them in their most intimate moments, in their own bedroom,’ commented the DCI. ‘Did that not concern you at all?’

‘Of course it did. But I so wanted to know the truth about Jane, I really didn’t think it through. After the night when Felix hit Jane, I had big second thoughts about the whole thing. I asked Gerry to take his camera down. He said it was too late, I was in it with him, and there were people involved that I wouldn’t want to cross.’

‘Do you still not know who these people are?’

‘Not really, although I’m beginning to guess they are some sort of secret service, or maybe an undercover police unit. And I just knew Gerry was holding back on me about all sorts of things. Jane’s death really frightened me. I arranged to meet Gerry yesterday afternoon, on the beach at low tide, and I was much tougher with him. I felt, probably wrongly, that I had nothing to lose. I told him if he didn’t come clean with me I would destroy him. God knows how I would have done any such thing. But he seemed to be in as bad a state as I was. Worse if anything.

‘It was then that he told me I’d only seen the edited version of the night Felix hit Jane. He showed me the full footage. The camera was one of those activated by movement, of course. The stuff I’d already seen ended with Jane lying down in the bed next to Felix, who already seemed to be sleeping. But there was more. Later, Jane woke Felix up and told him that she really had to talk to him. She’d remembered something terrible from the past, from her childhood. She mentioned a psychiatrist and regression therapy, which had brought it to the front of her mind, but she hadn’t been quite able to grasp it. She said she’d remained in a kind of denial until that night when she had frightened Joanna so much, and it had all come flooding back... ’

Sam stopped abruptly.

‘Please go on,’ Vogel prompted.

Sam looked as if he was about to continue, then he shook his head.

‘No, Mr Vogel,’ he said. ‘I just can’t. You’re going to have to ask Felix. I’ve already intruded unforgivably on the lives of my son and his poor wife, you said so yourself, and with terrible consequences.’

‘Look Sam, you’ve been guilty at least once before of withholding evidence during the course of this investigation. Please don’t make the same mistake again.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam. ‘It’s just too much, you see. Felix must decide whether to tell you.’

Vogel raised his voice very slightly.

‘You are treading very dangerous ground, Sam,’ he said. ‘You should be aware that I could charge you with perverting the course of justice. And Felix too, if he also decides to hold out on us.’

Sam shrugged.

‘You must do whatever you have to, Mr Vogel,’ he said.

He spoke quietly, which somehow made him sound all the more obdurate. Vogel considered he was going to get no further with Sam Ferguson on that particular line of questioning. Not for the moment, anyway.

‘All right, Sam,’ he said. ‘Let’s move on, for the moment. Are we to presume that the people who employed Gerry to spy on Jane knew whatever it was that she had done, and had her watched all those years because of it?’

‘Yes, Mr Vogel,’ he said. ‘That’s what I came to believe, anyway. Although I still don’t understand it. Indeed, they may well have been protecting her from afar, until they learned what she had remembered. Which, they wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t allowed Gerry to plant his damned surveillance camera. Collaborated with him, in fact... ’

Sam leaned forward slightly in his seat and lowered his face in his hands. He continued to speak, mumbling slightly through his fingers.

‘I asked Gerry again yesterday, who and why. He said he had never known why, not really, and I had to trust him, it was better, far better, if I didn’t know who.’

Sam looked up.

‘He was right about that, wasn’t he?’ he said. ‘They nearly killed me back there.’

‘Somebody tried, that’s for sure,’ agreed Vogel.

Sam might be a big burly man, fit for his years, but he was clearly deeply shaken. His face was ashen, and his hands were still trembling. Vogel thought it was time to get him medical attention, but he had one last question. The most important of all.

‘Sam, did Gerry have camera footage of Jane’s murder?’ asked the DCI.

‘No,’ said Sam. ‘Or at least, that’s what he told me. He said the surveillance camera had stopped working. It was the first thing he checked after he and Anne discovered Jane’s body. In fact, he said he spent most of the rest of that night fiddling with his phone, checking and double-checking, but the last forage he had was from earlier in the evening when Felix had gone up to his bedroom to change into his dinner suit. Gerry didn’t know whether something had gone wrong with it, maybe the battery had drained, or if someone had deliberately dismantled it before killing Jane.’

‘So that someone would have to have known it was there in the first place, and you don’t think Felix had any idea he was being filmed, do you, Sam?’

‘I’m sure he didn’t,’ replied Sam firmly.

‘One last thing,’ said the DCI. ‘I know you didn’t harm Gerry, you thought he’d asked you to meet him here, but where were you this morning?’

Sam laughed briefly and without humour.

‘I drove to Exeter to try to get a meeting with the chief constable,’ he said. ‘I thought that if anyone knew what was really going on, it would be him. And I thought he might help me. We used to play rugby together. But he clearly didn’t want to see me. I waited for hours before giving up.’

‘Why didn’t you tell your wife that?’

‘Look, it was before Felix was arrested. Amelia still believed Jane had taken her own life, and thought I did too. She would just have worried. When I arrived home and walked in on the arrest, I wasn’t going to come out with it in front of all of you. Then later, well, I’d failed, hadn’t I? So there didn’t seem much point. To tell the truth, I haven’t really known what the hell I’ve been doing since Jane died.’

‘All right, Sam, that’s enough for now,’ said Vogel. ‘But you do realize I will have to talk to you again, don’t you? Particularly if Felix fails to give us the information we need. Next time, it will be a formal interview at the police station, and if you refuse to offer your full cooperation you will be charged accordingly.’

Sam nodded very slightly. He looked as if he was past caring.

An ambulance had arrived. Two paramedics were standing by it. Vogel escorted Sam over to them, impatient now to get to Barnstaple police station. There were two men detained there who he was, by the minute, becoming more and more eager to interview.